Diana Darke is a Middle East cultural expert with a special focus on Syria. A graduate in Arabic from Oxford University, she has spent more than 30 years specialising in the Middle East and Turkey, working for both government and commercial sectors. She is the author of several books on Turkey, including Eastern Turkey (2014) and The Ottomans (2022), as well as on Middle East society, including My House in Damascus: An Inside View of the Syrian Crisis (2016), The Merchant of Syria (2018), Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe (2020), and Islamesque: The Forgotten Craftsmen Who Built Europe’s Medieval Monuments (2024)